Spent a few hours today fiddling around with the rear end today to fix the springs being non-captive at full droop and frequently bottoming out on bumps. Installed some Daihatsu Feroza front dampers, which are probably a fair bit over-damped and also trimmed the springs a little more to level the rear out. If I can find some dampers with the same dimensions as the Feroza ones, but with less aggressive rates, I'll swap them in, but I don't think there's much in that range off the shelf, unfortunately.

The good news is that I've recently discovered that old Mini rear shocks should bolt up. They're a shorter unit, like the Feroza ones, but as they're designed for a similarly sized car, should make a remarkable improvement over having basically no suspension and uncaptive rear springs, which I wasn't particularly fond of. I've got a pair on order and should have them early next week.

Yeah. Standard wheels are 12×4J +50, so technically I'm stepping down to the 10" wheels. I much prefer the 10" size over standard. There's also a hell of a lot more selection of wheels in 10" that fit easily. 5J +20 is what the Mk Is are, and they fit pretty neat in the guards. The FL-IIs are 5J +5 and they're gonna need a bit of work to get them to fit the front without poking too much, but still easily achievable. These Volks are 4.5J +35, I think (hard to tell from the image of the wheel size sticker) so they'll sit inboard a little bit, but I can live with that.

Got my new dampers today. Sizing looks to be spot on with what I was after, so I'm chuffed as nuts. Only little niggle is that the lower mount is to suit a 3/8" bolt, so I'll have to run out and grab some new bolts for those tomorrow. I'll probably drill them out a little to 10mm to keep everything metric. I'd drill them out to 12mm as the factory units are, but there's not enough meat in the crush tube for my liking, so smaller bolts it is.

Jiggered up the lower mounts with some new M10 bolts and a bunch of washers I found in a bucket of old bits and got the dampers installed today. Took it for a quick little drive and the difference is amazing. Feels a lot more stable and my springs are now captive again, so no clunking every time I enter or leave a driveway.

So I'm finally making a bit of progress on this, now that I have the Celica (see link in sig) to drive around in the meantime, so once I can get a hold of a welder again, I'll start tacking up everything and getting it all lined up and ready so I can take it to a mate for him to TIG it all up properly.

Still not too sure what I'm gonna do with these wheels just yet, but it is tempting to get some custom barrels made and make them 7" wide later on. Also, have a look at what's on Yahoo every now and again. There's usually always some cool sets of 10" wheels in 110PCD for very affordable prices.

No progress on the exhaust just yet, since I had to give back the welder I was borrowing so it's owner could do some work, but I should have it back soon.

Considering that I'm a pretty bad welder and I'm using a gas-less MIG to tack this together, I think I'm doing reasonably well, haha. This is the front half or the exhaust in the making. I'll see If I can get some work done on the actual headers tomorrow.

Been doing some work on the headers this afternoon, and I've knocked out two of the runners in ~3 hours, so I'll hopefully knock out the last one tomorrow and check that it's all good or if it needs tweaking. No pictures just yet, since I'll wait til I'm done and happy with them.

To make up for the lack of exhaust pictures, here's something I did last night.